I’m going to do something crazy because I really want to. Don’t worry, I’ll finish of the list of ’25 by 25′ later but I’m posting this first.
As I was walking back from my room I was thinking of how I want to spend my last few months of college. I sometimes imagine I’m having a conversation with someone about my life (I’m weirder than you thought!) and in this conversation I was explaining how I like to divide up my social time. The conversation was brought on by my recollection of a dinner that I’ll be having with Allie today which we’ve deemed as “bonding time” (that’s a whole other story). Anyway, as I was talking to this fake person (it actually wasn’t a fake person; I remember who it was now but I’ll omit that piece of information) who wanted to know the intricate and boring details of my life, I found myself trying to explain to her what percentage of my time I want to spend with my friends. Then I realized, for all my “intentionality” and “deliberateness” in friendship, I have no idea how much time I actually spend with people. So I’m going to find out.
I’m going to spend the next week tracking how much time I spend with people with some specific rules. Before I get to the rules though, let me say that I do realize how crude and calculating this may sound but it really isn’t meant to be that way (though I don’t disagree that it is relatively analytical). I just want to see how much of my time I use in relationships. To that end, I want to know how much of my time I spend with certain people because I don’t want to spend 90% of my time with someone with whom I never intend to communicate after college. So here are the rules, in no particular order:
1. Just because I live with my roommate, doesn’t mean that every hour we are in the room together counts as time we spend together. If we’re talking/hanging out that counts but if we’re just being alive near each other, that doesn’t count.
2. Small talk doesn’t count. I’ve never felt close to someone after asking them about the weather.
3. Some people count more than others. This means family and close friends have more weight than randos since (probably) spending an hour with my friend Stephanie is the equivalent of spending 2 hours with someone I don’t know as well. Still, with that being said, time still matters. If I talk to my brother once a year, no matter how close we are, our relationship will soon fall apart.
4. Texting doesn’t count. Because texting is what you do when you don’t really have anything to say to someone. It’s like small talk.
5. Phone conversations do count.
6. I’m tracking the time I spend alone. This will have two categories: working and chilling.
7. I’m tracking the time I spend with God. I struggled with this one for a while because I don’t want it to become legalistic but decided ultimately it would be a good thing for me to see.
I hope, as much as I can, I’ll proceed normally throughout this next week. Knowing that I’m keeping track of who I spend time with will obviously make me more cognizant of what I’m doing but hopefully it won’t be too bad. There are 168 hours in a week. I spend 50-65 hours sleeping. 5 (!!!!!) of those hours are spent in class. That leaves almost 100 hours for me to spend between work, friends, personal time, and God time. Let’s see what happens!
Second Chance 